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Individual Agricultural Recovery
After Nuclear Holocaust

"The Farmer Comes First in the Reconstruction of Society"
(Techniques for Agriculture Recovery)

bruce@webpal.org
Bruce M. Beach


Table of Contents:

Prolog: and about the Author

Introduction: What the Farmer Needs

LETS: How to operate without money

Radiation: Fallout and Radiation IN FOOD after a Nuclear War.

For much more detailed information about the effect of nuclear weapons, the measurement of radiation, radiation measuring instruments, and so forth, for other than in food see:
the Resources Section
in the Root Web page

Agriculture: Farming After a Nuclear War

There is also a lot about simplified farming in the separate Table of Contents linked from the Pioneering section below:

Energy: Alternate resources.

Technology: Simplified Machines and how to make things work.

Pioneer: The way they did it in the old days.

What ???: What else might someone recommend for this series?


Prolog: About the Author

The purpose of this web page, as with many others that I written, is to assist mankind in the restoration of society after a nuclear holocaust, which I strongly anticipate to be its destiny.

The sub-title of this essay "The Farmer Comes First in the Reconstruction of Society" is self explanatory. Not only is it an obvious truth, it is also a subject dear to the author's roots. While it is true that he is the first generation in his family to be born off the farm, his wife was born on the farm and mostly for the exception of educational years and military service, he has lived in farming communities and among relatives that have remained in that industry.

While the author is particularly suited to deal with the problems of societal reconstruction, having been formally trained as an institutional economist, these subjects that he has written upon for many decades seriously suffer from the defect that there is almost total lack of dialog or critique because they are a subject in which there is practically absolutely no interest on the part of others. If you wish, you may:

click here to see my bio.

and you may click here to learn more about Ark Two

and click here for more nuclear recovery info.

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Table of Contents


Introduction: What the Farmer Needs

For the farmer to accomplish his task,
he must have three things.

        security

        incentive

        resources

While confiscation, plundering, theft, exorbitant taxation, forced labor, and other similar forms of social transfer can accomplish short term goals of acquisition, in the long run they are very inefficient. As well as are over-centralization of authority and bureaucratic overburdens.

Free competitive markets, individual initiative, entrepreneurship, private ownership of the means of production, and the other accruements of a free society boundlessly demonstrated their worth in the productivity of the North American farmer when combined with plentiful fertile land, semi-stable markets and revolutionary advances in technology and the biosciences. These permitted, in the last two centuries, an inversion of 90% of the population living on the farm and 10% off to 10% living on the farm and 90% off with there still being great surpluses of production for export.

With all that - the often instability of many of the food product pricing markets, the machinations of the banking and finance industry, along with the vagaries of weather and pestilence combined with the oft-time seeming burden of government regulations to make farm life one of turmoil as society struggled to find a just method of reallocation of resources from an overproductive industry to other fields which were also struggling with problems of oversupply.

The concern for justice, both for the farm community suppliers and the non-farm community consumers, must ever remain the foremost consideration of those who try to regulate the agricultural field at any time. Pure laizze faire is not the answer, as evidenced by what happened to the farm community in the Great Depression, and there is no question but that the instability of completely free markets can be equally detrimental to producer and consumer alike.

Scale of production, scale of processing plants, the means of transportation and distribution, costs for machinery, fuel, fertilizer, seed and other resources are all matters that have often been outside the control of the individual farmer or even the farm community as a whole. Any concept that individual farm families can retreat to an isolated unit on their own is totally unrealistic. The great productivity that was achieved in North America was achieved through efficiencies arising out of social organization, specialization and economies of scale.

While there was bounty, there were also many undesirable effects. Styles of life that were not pleasant to those entrapped in them - such as migrant labor, or often what amounted in fact to even slave labor for many producers in the world market. There was the expense of high production at the cost of an often onerous burden to the environment in the destruction of resources that would sometimes take centuries to replace, if they were replaceable at all, and there was reasonable suspicion that some of the methods of production resulted in product that was not as healthy for the end user as it should have been.

To the survivor's of a nuclear holocaust, many of the above points will seem to be but quibbles, and they will simply wish for the "good old days" before the nuclear war. However, we must remember that it was the power of the over centralized bureaucracies and the gigantic soulless corporations that created the problem in the first place. It was their unjust international transfer of resources and products of labor and the lack of universal concern for justice in economic exchange between all nations of the world in both agriculture and other economic spheres that created the social unrest, and eventual holocaust. It is not that institutional greed is more evil than individual greed, it is just that it is less amendable to rectification. Over the last two centuries the resulting terrible cost to the farm community has not been just an economic one but also, for untold tens of thousand families, personal loss of loved ones who were drawn up in the maelstrom of international conflicts, far beyond their personal interest, never to be seen again.

There is no question but that in time, productivity can be restored. However, the real question is - can justice be established - because that is something that has never been achieved. Justice, in this world, has always been, and always will be relative. Because there is always a better way and a worse way, we should try to find the better way. If we decide that we don't like peace, then we can always go back to war. And there is no question, that if we work at it, we can be ready for another nuclear war in twenty years.

Top down design has been the problem. Direction by gigantic entities of power, influence and control. The rule of power politics and special interest groups. The solution is bottom up selection WITHOUT POLITICS. The top will then reflect the aspirations of the bottom. All of this, I explain in the

LETS system.

Also, under LETS, no matter how misguided or mistaken the policies in the higher echelons may be, there still remains a degree of autonomous local control that permits the amelioration of what could otherwise be intolerable suffering.

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Table of Contents

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